Removing authorized user on a credit card. Would this work?

[Anonymous]

Hi! Had a somewhat crazy idea that I wanted to run by someone else. We are looking to buy a new home in about 6 months and are doing some cleanup on our credit scores. We've come a long way in the past few years rebuilding our credit, but have a few last things we want to do. All of our credit cards will be paid in full by the time we apply for a mortgage except one. While our current scores are in a range that we can qualify for a conventional mortgage I worry about the balance on the one remaining credit card. The balance will likely be $15,000 and with the downpayment and the other things we are paying off before then we don't think we can pay that one as well. Recently it dawned on me that the CC is not actually in my husband's name. He is the authorized user on the card as his mom opened it for him to use in college. How crazy would it be to just have his mom take him off as the authorized user? Would this just completely erase that balance from his credit score? It is near its limit and the one thing we are struggling most with right now is credit utilization. One downfall to this is that it is his oldest CC. However, when I have used several simulators it didn't seem to make that big of a difference. Any thoughts?

[xaximus]

I believe the impact of removing him as an AU based on the UTI is a smarter move then worrying about AAoA. What is your DH next oldest account? A simple way of knowing the impact would be to take all of your accounts ages and divide by the number of accounts. That will give you your AAoA.

Example -
Card 1 - 60 months old
Card 2 - 30 months old
Card 3 - 12 months old
Card 4 - 1 month old
Total months - 103
AAoA - 25.75 months (basically 26 months, i.e. 2 year 2 months AAoA).

UTI has more impact then the AAoA.

[Anonymous]

That's one that could go either way, but probably leans towards removing it as the better option. It will disappear from his report after about a month.

Given the time frame and other info mentioned, I would recommend asking the loan officer when you go to apply for the mortgage. They can take a look at your overall credit file and get a better idea of which option to take.

Hypothetically- if your income is high then the $15k on that card may not be a big impact to your debt/income. Then it may be worth leaving if it helps with age of accounts. But, if your income is more median then it may be necessary to remove it.